“The Cat Photographer” has totally earned his title.
By David Rosenberg
For the past 70 years, 95-year-old Walter Chandoha has made a career out of photographing cats for both editorial and commercial purposes. This year, Aperturepublished a collection of Chandoha’s colorful cat photographs in the appropriately titled Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer.
A self-described lover of photographing “everything and anything,” Chandoha first stumbled into cat photography after he found a stray kitten he named Loco in the snow. He took a few pictures of Loco, submitted them to various contests, and won a few prizes. But things didn’t get serious until the early 1950s when Chandoha began photographing in color. With help from his wife Maria, who was his art director, secretary, animal herder, and also the mother of their six children, he began to play around with a few different ideas, including photographing a kitten wearing a red Christmas ribbon. They submitted that image to some magazines and were thrilled when Woman’s Home Companion called to say they were going to run the image on their cover and offered an incredible payment of $500.
To read the full article:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2015/12/18/walter_chandoha_is_the_cat_photographer_photos.html